Subrata Dasgupta

Dasgupta is presently Professor Emeritus, School of Computing & Informatics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where from 1993 to 2018 he held the Computer Science Trust Fund Eminent Scholar Chair.[2] From 1999 to 2013 he was also Director, Institute of Cognitive Science and Professor, Department of History. He had previously taught at Ohio State University, Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta, and the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (where he was the first Dowty Professor of Computer Systems Engineering). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Dasgupta has featured in interviews and articles in multiple BBC Radio programs, British national newspapers and magazines, Indian national newspapers, and regional Spanish and Canadian newspapers. His biographical entries appear in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Writers Directory, and Contemporary Authors.[3] He is the recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from the Marquis Who’s Who Publication Board.

Subrata Dasgupta’s research from 1974 to 1991 spanned such branches of computer science as computer architecture, microprogramming, hardware description languages, program verification, and design theory. Since 1992, his work has focused on the cognitive and historical nature of creativity in the natural and artificial sciences, engineering and technology, art, literary scholarship, and cross-cultural milieux. In addition to some 75 papers, essays and articles, he is the author of 18 books.

Influenced by Herbert Simon’s seminal book The Sciences of the Artificial, Dasgupta has written extensively on the historical, epistemological and cognitive nature of the artificial sciences and, in particular, on computer science as a science of the artificial. His books include: The Design and Description of Computer Architectures (John Wiley, 1984), Computer Architecture: A Modern Synthesis. Volume 1: Foundations and Volume 2: Advanced Topics (John Wiley, 1989), Design Theory and Computer Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991),[4] and It Began with Babbage : The Genesis of Computer Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) [5] (selected as an 'Outstanding Academic Title for 2014' by the journal Choice), Computer Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016; a volume in OUP’s best-selling and prestigious “Very Short Introduction” series), and most recently, The Second Age of Computer Science: From Algol Genes to Neural Nets (Oxford University Press, 2018).[6]

He has published numerous papers and essays on the cognitive-historical-biographical aspects of creativity in art, science, technology and scholarship in such print journals as Perspectives on Science, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, Creativity Research Journal, Physics News, Physics of Life Reviews and the online journal PsyArt. His books include Creativity in Invention and Design (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Technology and Creativity (Oxford University Press, 1996), Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science (Oxford University Press, 1999), [7] Twilight of the Bengal Renaissance: R.K. Dasgupta and His Quest for a World Mind (Dey’s Publishing, 2005), The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (Permanent Black, 2007), and Awakening: The Story of the Bengal Renaissance (Random House India, 2010), [8] and most recently, A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity (Routledge, 2019).

One of his special interests is the nature of the creative mind spanning multiple cultures, especially the ‘Indo-Western mind’. His work on the 19th century creative and intellectual movement in Bengal called the Bengal Renaissance addresses this mentality.

Dasgupta’s interests in cross-cultural creativity has extended to ‘creative literary writing’ of both fiction and nonfiction. He has published three novels, Three Times a Minority (Writers Workshop Calcutta, 2003), The Golden Jubilee (Amaryllis, 2013), Voice of the Rain Season [9] (Fingerprint, 2018), and a memoir of his childhood in England, Salaam Stanley Matthews (Granta, 2006).[10][11]